Its plunging fortunes have hit consumer confidence and played a big part in the Danish referendum rejection of the euro which, in turn, hit the value of the single currency.Will he survive? Under a "gentlemen's agreement", Mr Duisenberg is expected to step down in 2002 to make way for Jean-Claude Trichet, the governor of the Bank of France who - ironically - hosts today's meeting in Paris. The Frenchman, however, has his own difficulties, being under judicial investigation over the Credit Lyonnais bank which lost around $18bn before undergoing a bail-out. That makes an early hand-over to Mr Trichet unlikely and the search for another successor politically and logistically difficult.Were he to lose the confidence of the ECB's governing council, Mr Duisenberg would find himself in an impossible position, but the chances are that he will stay in post, a weakened figurehead of a sickly currency.As one EU official put it yesterday: "The question is: if not Duisenberg, who else?". "Caan in drug clinic." "Caan accused of beating model." "Caan quizzed over death plunge." "Caan stands bail in Mafia case." "Caan struggles for cash." Trawl through James Caan's cuttings from the last 10 years and these are the headlines that leap out alongside the assorted stories about cocaine addiction and his friendship with Hollywood madam, Heidi Fleiss. "Caan in drug clinic." "Caan accused of beating model." "Caan quizzed over death plunge." "Caan stands bail in Mafia case." "Caan struggles for cash." Trawl through James Caan's cuttings from the last 10 years and these are the headlines that leap out alongside the assorted stories about cocaine addiction and his friendship with Hollywood madam, Heidi Fleiss. The 60-year-old Bronx-born actor always seems to be caught in the eye of some storm or other The turbulence extends to his best-known movie characters. Either he's being pounded by mastodon-like lunks on roller skates (Rollerball), in thrall to loan sharks (The Gambler), being shot to pieces at a toll booth (The Godfather), or having Kathy Bates attend to his leg with a saw (Misery).Given the battering that he has received on and off camera, Caan is remarkably well-preserved.

"You look great," a photographer tells him with a hint of surprise in her voice. "Oh, it's all make-up," He speaks in a wise-cracking New York drawl. "You know the old saying, absence makes the heart grow fonder. Bullshit! It makes them think you're dead," he roars when invited to contemplate the long lull in his career in the mid-Eighties while he recovered from drug addiction. "I've been working a lot lately, but it took a while."He reacts with cheerful stoicism to the inevitable questions about Sonny Corleone.

It's not just journalists who are obsessed by a part he played almost 30 years ago Hollywood casting agents are just as bad. "If it was up to them, I'd be playing Sonny Corleone my entire life," he sighs. "Usually, if there weren't eight people dead by page 11, they wouldn't send me the script. People say, 'Gee, you do a lot of mafia movies.' I think I've done two, out of 60."For Caan, The Godfather represents a lost golden age. Back in the halcyon Seventies, before effects-driven movies and sci-fi spectaculars clouded the scene, actors were allowed to be actors Studio bosses cared about making movies. It's a familiar thesis, rehearsed at great length in Peter Biskind's book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, but Caan is talking from first-hand experience He sounds a little Rip Van Winkle. The way he describes it, he went to sleep - or took a sabbatical - for a few years ("I quit, coached kids baseball, basketball and soccer," he mumbles) and by the time he woke up, Hollywood had changed for the worse."Most of the guys who are heads of studios now don't know nothing about making movies.

All they know is that if you get Adam Sandler or Jim Carrey to make the film, you're guaranteed to make $150m." There is one executive he respects, however, and that is Miramax's Harvey Weinstein "The guy makes films That's his business. He doesn't go to board meetings and talk about how many asses were on seats and what to tell the shareholders."Caan concedes that he and his fellow method-meisters used to take themselves ridiculously seriously. They despised anybody who hadn't trained at either the Actor's Studio or the Neighborhood Playhouse "The truth is... myself, De Niro, Pacino, Hoffman - we were arrogant, pompous asses," he exclaims. The intensity with which which he approached roles puts even De Niro to shame.